The Candidate and the Crimson Letter

The abominable burden of puritanism returns for its codes. The English invented it, and the Americans inherited it. Not in vain has it been there, in Yankeeland, where that ghost has returned from its tomb and has started to walk. Political correctness goes all over the world today; it spreads in the heart of the society much like the metastasis of malignant tumors.

Last night, the one from Saturday to Sunday, I woke up at 4 a.m. with insomnia; to avert it, something I ended up achieving, I devoured a splendid book by Guy de Maupassant: On the writer’s right to cannibalize the life of others (The Olive Grove).

Arancha Salama, coordinator of the White Nights, had recommended it to me. She had recently brought it up to the slot “Literary Duels” of that program. A wise move — by Arancha, I mean.

The work itself gathers some of over 200 articles published by Maupassant in the parisian press in the end of the 19th century. He was avant lettre, a columnist, in the sense that we give to that word nowadays.

I was surprised (or not) to verify that in the France of that time the exact same moral, aesthetic, customary, political and economic problems existed. Those that tightly bind today’s world. Most of Maupassant’s articles could appear today in the pages of this newspaper without their readers suspecting they were written retelling what was happening not only in France, but also in all Europe, a century and a half ago.

As I was reading that book, I highlighted several things, many paragraphs, lots of phrases… One of them said: “I would really like if you could quote a single man — yes, a single man who has remained absolutely monogamous all his life.”

I smiled when I read it, and a few minutes later, I got to sleep and had a placid dream that held me in bed until eight. I got out of bed at that time, I opened the computer and I found out that Herman Cain had stepped back from the race towards the White House due to denunciations reported by the puritans’ sentries, who are always on duty, especially to watch for extramarital affairs.

Amazing. What do an individual’s actions or inactions in his sexual life, as long as they do not mediate in his acts any violence, exploitation or abuse, have to do with his capacity to govern the policy and the economy of a country?

Nathaniel Hawthorne published in 1850 a novel titled the same way I partly title this blog. In the New England (later the United States) of the 17th century, adulteresses were marked with a huge crimson letter A embroidered to the front of their outfits. A century later, Arthur Miller wrote a drama in which he took into account other similar areas of sexual and social repression and named it The Crucible.

The United States does not seem to have reached the age of reason. It still remains adolescent. Cain’s disengagement confirms it once again. We’re not doing OK. Rome fell when, after the adoption of Christianity, it closed in itself the anathema of the Sixth Commandment like a screw: “Thou shall not commit adultery,” and the Ninth, that rounded out: “Thou shall not covet thy neighbor’s wife.”

And what about thy neighbor’s husband? Yahweh did not say anything at the Sinai Peninsula about that.

I have spent my life looking with greedy eyes to women without repairing in their marital status. What about you?

Do not dare, if you’re in that situation, to run for the White House. That place is a seething mass of supposedly mainly single interns, but that doesn’t mean they’re less affectionate or, according to the puritans, sinful.

If you do, you will be in trouble…